Love Thy Neighbor
by Aria Rayn
Summary: Oneshot. Since I'm an evil, currently irritated author, poor Sammie is going to be driven insane by her neighbors as I am. And I'm glaring. Read & review, please! SJ romance surprise end.


Love Thy Neighbor

Sam woke up on a pleasant Saturday morning. The _sun_ was out, the _birds_ were singing – it was a wonderfully cliché peacefulness.

Then it struck:

The attack

**OF THE NEIGHBORS!**

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-ding, dong-

Sam opened the door. "Hello, Annie," she said to the cute little girl from the house to the left. She was donned in the fabulous colors of tan and brown – typical Brownie Scout.

"Good morning, ma'am!" the chirpy girl said…quite chirpily. "Will you please buy some of our girl scouts cookies? All the money is needed for our hiking trip!"

Sam considered this offer very carefully. "Alright, put me down for a box of Double Fudge Cookie Bars," she agreed.

The little girl pouted. "What's wrong?" Sam asked.

"We still need two hundred dollars more. I've already been up and down five streets asking people to buy my cookies!" Annie cried. "I need to sell ten more boxes or I can't go!"

"Oh!" Sam said, instantly glooified. "Oh, okay. I'll buy five boxes."

The girl instantly beamed at her. "Sign here!" she ordered, sounding like a certain gorgeous CO of Sam's. Sam obeyed and signed, and accepted the boxes that were promptly shoved into her arms.

"Thank you!" Annie said, skipping off to her next neighbor.

Sam shook her head and wondered what she'd do with five boxes. Hmm…maybe she could con Teal'c, Daniel, and Colonel O'Neill into taking a box off her hands on Monday. The fourth box, of course, she'd give to Janet (though she better hold off until after they got back from the meeting; it would cheer the doctor up after having to deal with a grumpy Colonel).

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Sam walked out to her car and was immediately greeted by baseballs flashing by her face, missing her head by inches; she and her car survived, but a stray one missed her by yards and her poor window became a casualty.

The culprits? – The kid boys from the house across the street. They gasped and promptly ran into the house, shouting "Sorry, Sam!"s on their way.

Sam sighed and shook her head. _Mrs. Jenkins_, she thought irritably, _that's the third thing they broke with their bats this month. Sorry, but I'm gonna demand money for a new window._ Boy that would be one _wonderful_ conversation: "Hi, Mrs. Jenkins. Your crazy kids broke, yes, they broke another window. Punishing them won't be enough, Mrs. Jenkins. I would like my window replaced. No I am not suing you – wait, Mrs. Jenkins don't hang…up…"

She wasn't looking forward to THAT discussion.

Suddenly, Sam heard the tinkling…something, and saw a dog and its owner appear before her house from behind the shrubbery. The dog was walking along on its leash and trotting along happily. Spotting her fence, it promptly stopped, sniffed, squatted, and dumped some _foul_ smelling presents on her lawn.

The owner, Mr. McKinney from two doors to the left of her house, halted, waited for it to stop, then tugged it along its way.

"Um, Mr. McKinney?" Sam asked.

Mr. McKinney stopped at looked at her. "Yeah?"

She waved at the pile of doggy doo. "Are you going to clean that up?" she asked.

"Nope. Don't have anything with me." He turned and began walking again.

"It's the law," she said pointedly. "And I'd like to come home to a clean lawn." _After probably saving the world again,_ she added silently.

"Lots of dogs will probably have shitted on your lawn after mine. What's one pile?"

Sam blinked at his rudeness and language. While the language didn't surprise her, she wished he would be politer, considering she'd always been polite and considerate to all her neighbors (and there was the little itty fact she saved his ass along with the _rest_ of the planet several times with her team).

"Please pick it up," she said.

"With what?" he demanded, stopping again and looking very irritated.

"When you go home from your walk, pick up a paper bag and scoop it in that!" she said.

"And why would I go out of my way?"

_Because if you don't, I'll ask Sokar to give you a lift to frickin' Netu,_ she thought irritably. _And I'll thrown in your little doggy, too, to make him happy._ Sam sighed. "Because it's the neighborly and the right thing to do."

He laughed. "Yeah, sure. See you later, blondie."

Then he promptly left.

Sam stood in the driveway, stunned and irritated. "I save the world for a living and the neighbor that calls me 'blondie' can't do so much as pick up poop?" she hissed under her breath, jumping in her car before someone else could stop her from going about her day. A good, thorough beating of the punching bag would do her good.

What happened to the songbirds?

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Later, in the afternoon, Sam decided to do some grocery shopping.

"Oh, hi, Sam!" greeted Laura, a teenage girl from the house with the baseball window-breakers. She was also a cashier at the local grocery. "Oh, sorry about Tim and Lawrence this morning," she said as she rang up Sam's items. "Paper or plastic?"

"Paper," Sam said, "and I really don't want to be the bitch that ruined your day, but that's the third time those two broke property of mine."

Laura shuddered. "Oh, I know!" she said, frowning at a package of veggies, fumbling it for the price. She beeped it and said, "They broke into my room last week, even despite the new lock I put in. Completely destroyed my room! And what's worse, my geography teacher didn't believe me when I said my brothers lost my homework!"

Sam laughed slightly.

Laura paused, looking over a box of tampons. "You know," she said, tapping it with a finger, "this is a really crappy brand. I tried it once," she gave a thumbs-down and stuck out her tongue. "The string broke when I tried to pull it out! I had to fish it out with my fingers and was sore for a week. _Bad idea_," she said as though Sam were a young preteen not yet accustomed to the ways of the woman. "I'd go with Tampax Pearl."

Sam blinked. The sixteen-year-old from across the street was giving her, who dealt with Naquadah reactors, snakeheads, people like Rodney McKay, and neighbors who won't take the time to pick their dog's poo off her yard, advice about what brand of tampons to use. She glanced behind her; the man behind her in line was bright red in the face at having witnessed such talk.

"Just ring it and bag it," Sam ordered lowly.

Laura shrugged and said, "Alright, but don't say I didn't warn you. That'll be twenty-two thirty-three."

Sam handed her a twenty and a ten and told her to keep the change. The quicker she got home, in the sanctuary of her own house, the better.

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Sam got home and shut her car door, relieved. Only fifteen more yards to go and she would be safe. Fifteen, fourteen –

Kabam! Sam turned, horrified, Millie two doors from the right crashed into her beloved Volvo on her bike.

Sam rushed to the scene, going first to the girl on the ground. "Millie, are you all right?" she demanded of the ten year old.

Millie's head spun dizzily, then she popped back onto her feet in only the way a ten year old could. "Great!" she exclaimed, picking up her bike. "But my bike's _dead_!" She looked miserably at her bike.

Sam wanted to faint when she saw her beloved Volvo. Her bike and car were her most precious personal items. She called her bike, lovingly, "Crazy", and her Volvo, lovingly, "Crusin' Cutie". This, of course, she had never revealed to a single soul.

Cruisin' Cutie's bumper was smashed in and a light was broken. In comparison to Millie's bike, the damage to Cruisin' Cutie was minimal, but – this was _Cruisin Cutie!_ Not _Bruisin'_ Cutie!

Sam wanted to say to Millie, "I'm glad you're alright dear. Now get over here so I can hurt you. Badly."

"My…my…my…" Sam stuttered, unable to take her eyes off of her poor, unjustly bruised Volvo.

"See you later Sam. Sorry about your car!"

Numbly, Sam opened her gate, drove her car up her driveway, and parked it in her garage. There, Cruisin' Cutie took her spotlight next to Crazy's spotlight. Sam sniffled and turned off the garage lights, walking into her house.

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Still mourning the injury done to her Volvo, dear Cruisin' Cutie, Sam flipped through some of her TV guides aimlessly. Sighing, she tossed them to the side and got up off her couch. Maybe looking online for the best auto mechanic to replace the parts on her beloved Volvo would help make her feel better. Knowing that Cruisin' Cutie was in good hands helped.

Sam plopped down on her bed with her laptop, a bag of chocolates and a glass of milk on the dresser. She surfed the web, her mind calmed at last in her search for The Perfect Mechanic.

Suddenly, a high-pitched squealing shot through the air from outside. It could only be described as a cross between a person being Gou'alded and a dying cat, and it scared the _hell_ out of Sam. She jumped, the laptop crashing to the floor. Amongst her terror, her sensible side thought, _So that's why you're only supposed to use a laptop on a flat surface_, as her mouth squealed, "_Brainy!_"

She snatched her laptop off the floor and dusted it with the exquisite care of machine-maternity instincts. The scream came again, and Sam's body was jolted with the intensity of it.

"No! STOP!" she heard from outside.

Thrusting the window open, she squeezed out of it while donned in all but her pj-bottoms and a rather tiny tank top with string straps. She dashed to the source; it came to the house from her right, in the backyard. Several yells of which she could not make out were exchanged as she leapt at the fence, clawing boards off it with all the force of a madwoman.

Several squeals and shouts came as she broke through the fence to find several dark, shadowed forms staring at her.

"What's wrong?" she asked, going into immediate field, "I can kick your butt" mode.. "What's going on?" She looked from face to face, bewildered at the shock she saw in some of them and the airy expressions on others.

One of the airy-faced teenagers said, "Dude, yer neighbor's a total hottie."

"Shut up!" hissed the teenage boy that lived there.

Moans and sighs came from a few yards away, where a teenage boy and girl sprawled half-naked on the lawn in a heated frenzy.

"Sam, miss?" asked the small girl that also lived there, her voice small and scared. "Why did you break down the fence?"

Sam's eyes traveled over the group again. "You're all drunk?" she asked incredulously. No one was getting hurt?

"Nuh-uh," slurred a drunken young man, coming closer, drooling, his eyes and face hooked on her breasts as though they were magnified to them. She abruptly pushed him away.

"You kids were making enough noise to raise the dead!" she roared. "It sounded like a man was being _tortured_ and _killed_ over here! Where the hell are your parents?" she demanded of Jordan, the teenage resident of the house.

"Out," he mumbled.

Sam glowered at them. "Goodnight," she said stiffly, as that was all she could muster without losing control and strangling them all, with the exception of the five-year-old girl, who probably wasn't supposed to be at the party. Or, rather, that the party was not allowed around.

Stiffer still, she walked back through the broken fence and jabbed the boards back in place, just enough to keep those animals out of her yard. With that, she put on sneakers and a bathrobe and went to her garage.

Looking between her motorcycle and her Volvo, she debated between risking further injury to Cruisin' Cutie or risking new injury to Crazy. Although any injury done to Crazy would be fatal, she decided that her Volvo had been too traumatized for the day.

So that was how Sam came to be riding her bike down the streets at 2300 at night in sneakers, pajamas, and a bathrobe.

_My home isn't safe anymore,_ she thought, dazed, though not enough that she couldn't drive safely. _I need to get to the SGC. The SGC. My lab. My Naquadah reactor. Siler. Walter. Labby. I'll be safe in Labby._

Sam Carter felt too traumatized to feel disgusted with herself for sinking to a five-year-old's vocabulary. Her entire being was focused on one thing: SGC.

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"Sweet mercy!" she cried when she reached the SGC parking lot. She was mere minutes away from safety.

Turning off her bike, she walked it to the sign-in sheet. Briefly, amusedly considering signing herself as "Sam and Crazy" she thought against it. "Maj. S. Carter" was scribbled on the page, and she strode down the halls to the elevator that would lead them to the lower levels, to her lab.

"Uh, ma'am?" an SF asked, eyeing her bike with interest and a reluctant compliance for the regulations.

Sam flashed both her security badge and her military ID at the man without even looking at him. "Major Carter, U.S. Air Force," she said, "the bike's with me." Her tone held no room for argument.

Maneuvering her bike so she could back it into the elevator, Sam jabbed at the button for her floor, only half-irritably. Just being in the SGC put her mood up a dozen notches.

After arriving on her level, she walked her bike out of the elevator and through the halls. As a second thought, she looked back and was relieved to see that Crazy hadn't left any tire marks.

Slipping her card through the slot at her lab's door, she sighed as happiness hummed through her at the gasping sound of the blast door opening the way to her salvation. Feeling like the Queen of England, Sam led her bike into her sanctuary. Pausing, she left him beside her desk, promising silently she'd be gone mere minutes. Then she closed up her lab and pulled the wires, effectively making any entry impossible; she then grabbed two sheets and threw it over her bike, leaving the handlebars and front half exposed.

"It's not your show blanket," she murmured as she tucked it in around the edges, "but it'll do." Yawning, she flipped on the headlight and killed the switch to the lab lights. A cheery, faint glow hovered in the room. She sighed and took the second sheet for herself, and lay behind the desk and her bike, out of view from the door. It wasn't first class, but it was better.

Much better.

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Sam heard a faint sizzling and drilling in the back of her drowsy mind. Her eyes fluttered open, and she widened them, frowning worriedly as they got used to the dim light. Drilling? Sizzling?

She sat up, moaning inwardly at the soreness, and stood, leaning on her bike. Incredulously, she stared at her lab door.

Someone was drilling a circle through it. Huh.

A great circle in the door collapsed forward, and a head popped forth. "Major Carter?"

"Siler?" she asked hoarsely. She frowned and coughed. "Siler?" she repeated, her voice clear.

"She's in there sir, and conscious," he said, his head disappearing out of the floor. O'Neill's head popped in afterward.

"Carter?" he asked, his tone light, but in the way that she knew if he wasn't given a good excuse he would be very, very unpleasant…

"Sir? What's going on?"

"The security guys saw you unconscious on their tape. They contacted an airman and told him to see if you were alright, but the funniest thing happened! No one could get through. Wires were shot, apparently. Care to explain?"

Sam took a moment for all of it to register. "Oh!" she finally exclaimed. "Umm, about the wiring…those were the lazy handiwork of yours truly. I really, _really _didn't want anyone to come in…" She yawned.

"Carter damnit, if I find out you spent all day here I'll…"

"I didn't, sir!" she protested, ruffled. "I came in at about 2300."

"WHAT? Now why on _earth_ would you do something like that!"

Sam sighed. "Long story or short?"

"Short."

"My neighbors were driving me crazy."

O'Neill stared for a moment. "Now, Carter," he said, wagging an index finger at her, "remember the age-old saying, love thy neighbor!"

Sam gave him an exhausted, irked expression. "I don't think that virtue applies when your neighbor's little daughter cons you into buying five boxes of girl scouts cookies, the kids from across the street break a window with their baseball _again_, your grumpy fifty-year old man refuses to clean his dog's business off your lawn, the sister of the kids from across the street gives you life lessons on what _tampon brand_ to buy, the preteen from down the street destroys the front of your car, and your repulsive next-door neighbors' teenagers throw a party, get drunk, and _raise the dead from their graves_ with their howling and _high pitched SCREAMING!_"

O'Neill blinked at her outburst. Much to her satisfaction, he'd gone red when she mentioned Laura the Tampon Queen (men were so amusing!), and was at complete loss at what to say. At least he wouldn't be reprimanding her or anything, at least not for the next half hour.

"Ah…um…" he said aimlessly… "Coffee?" he asked suddenly.

Sam sighed, and gave him a small smile. "Sure, sir." She crawled out the hole and walked side by side with him to the commissary.

"Well, at least you'll be able to fix up your car easily enough," he commented.

"Oh, no, sir! C –" she cut short. The mentioning of her pet names for her automobiles would most definitely equal two hundred million years of pure torture from him. "-Um, my car only gets the best mechanic."

"Hey, you're a –!"

"An astrophysicist," she finished.

"Potato, patato," he said, waving her correction away as they clambered into the elevator.

A moment passed and she felt his breath on her ear. "Though," he said softly, "I have to say, your wardrobe is fabulous." He lightly fingered the material of her nightshirt through her open robe. He moved fully behind her and hugged her, pressing their bodies together.

Sam squawked as she felt a bulge against her backside, betraying his gentle, friendly touch with something definitely more. The elevator doors opened and in a flash he was gone, striding away with a bounce in his step and a whistle on his lips.

Feeling fully awake and somewhat confused, she stared after him, only hastily shooting forward when the doors started to close on her. Briefly she thought about all her neighbors, her irritatingly, mind-splittingly annoying neighbors, and how they'd driven her to now.

_Huh. Maybe neighbors aren't so bad after all…_ she thought, and ran to catch up with her gorgeous CO.


End file.
